Piece of my mind

In this "tale" I summarize the major landmarks of my 50-year career watching wild olive baboons (Papio anubis). I review some major discoveries, like baboon hunting and baboon social strategies of competition and defense, that only a creature with a "mind" could manage. My efforts expanded beyond science to include community-based conservation because quite early on these baboons experienced many of the threats of the Anthropocene. My research expanded to include studying crop-raiding by naïve groups of baboons, the first scientific translocation of a primate species, and a detour to study the invasion of a non-indigenous cactus, Opuntia stricta...

Cantando En La Sombras is a cathartic work that provides an unexpected repose to my consistently restless mind. A multi-sensory experience, this essay is a self-reflective piece that speaks to my sexual identity and journey of self-discovery through prose and song. Inspired by the groundbreaking work Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (Trujillo, 1994), I found the fortitude and autochthonous voice to tell my story, my way, through the candor, realism, and integrity in the stories of women who not only dared to live their truths but to immortalize them in words...

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Is self-consciousness necessary for consciousness? The answer is yes. So there you have it-the answer is yes. This was my response to a question I was asked to address in a recent AEON piece (https://aeon.co/essays/consciousness-is-not-a-thing-but-a-process-of-inference). What follows is based upon the notes for that essay, with a special focus on self-organization, self-evidencing and self-modeling. I will try to substantiate my (polemic) answer from the perspective of a physicist. In brief, the argument goes as follows: if we want to talk about creatures, like ourselves, then we have to identify the characteristic behaviors they must exhibit...

Trying to focus on a piece of text and keep unrelated thoughts at bay can be a surprisingly futile experience. The current study explored the effects of different instructions on participants' capacity to control their mind-wandering and maximize reading comprehension, while reading. Participants were instructed to (a) enhance focus on what was read (external) or (b) enhance meta-awareness of mind-wandering (internal). To understand when these strategies were important, we induced a state of self-focus in half of our participants at the beginning of the experiment...

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When I was facing the daunting task of recounting my approximately 70 years of scientific career and some aspects of my personal life, I decided to write this autobiographical piece in a "different" way. After a section on the almost bare facts of my life (Section 1), I include several other parts, loosely connected in time, in each of which I make an almost self-contained point, decreasing in this way the need for consistency and coherence in the whole article. I discuss, for example, the importance of original ideas, the independence of junior colleagues, and my work with molecular beams and in nanomedicine...

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